Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.
AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:
human nature
social life
punishment
abuse
anger
empathy
relatedness theory
evolution
strength
resilience
etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):
racism
trauma and healing, psychology
attention
culture, tradition
control
bullying
Redefinitions – 12. Bullying
AST, a definition:
AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.
The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.
The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., – add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.
AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.
Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:
AST, “Bullying”
The above definitions sort of glosses over the main thing, I added “ordeals,” and “etc.,” in a less than honest way, really, I think of it as the first law, the first punishment, and that is the ordeal; it’s spanking, in a word, that begins the entire process and the rest may not happen without it. That’s what I really think. I was just trying to soft-soap you.
“Spanking” is the term for authorized abuse of children, the word for hurting children with the justification of punishment and authority, and I think we’re mostly all subject to it, and we are mostly all carrying this social default level of abuse.
AST defines “spanking,” a few ways, one different one being that it is abuse applied before . . . wait, before “epigenetic maturity?” Is this a thing yet? – before the genetic options have all been set, is what I’m after.
AST defines spanking as abuse during childhood, as epigenetically functional abuse. I think AST – as sort of our dark side personified – has hacked the genesuite, and is setting an option, the fighting option of our genes, by providing a dependably abusive environment at the time when the options are being set, childhood.
AST sees bullying as functionally identical, same as in the ‘Abuse’ entry, the innocent and the guilty are all engaged in the same enterprise. Biology doesn’t read your stupid laws.
When we are abused, we are abused and science would not divide your abusers into “innocent abusers,” and “guilty abusers,” would it, not science that cares about you and the abuse. But society labels bullies, vilifies bullies, for mirroring the exact behaviour exercised on all of us, for the exact behaviour they were taught, and not only taught generally, but taught with pain, with trauma.
Never mind criticism, never mind anger at the gaslighting – it’s just never going to bloody work, is it? Punishing and “fighting bullying?”
At the same time?
Never.
Never, never, never. Ever.
Jeff
May 10th., 2022
Abuse with an Excuse 